Monday, November 12, 2012

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

Think hallucinations are only for the mentally unstable? Think again. Hallucinations are different than imagination and dreams, but are more common than you might think. Since man has been walking on 2 feet, he has been (yes, or she) seeking ways to alter his reality through drugs, fasting, and sensory deprivation, among myriad other ways to induce hallucinations. People with certain physical disease can be prone to hallucinations, as well as a great number of people who are losing their sight or hearing. You will find that hallucinations are vast and fascinating when you read Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations.

Have you read any of Oliver Sacks' books? I absolutely adore him. He wrote the very famous The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings- the book that got made into a movie with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Sacks offers a fascinating and compassionate look into the human mind, its capabilities and quirks, and presents his books in a very approachable and readable way for the lay person and professional alike.

Contents of Hallucinations include:

Silent Multitudes: Charles Bonnet Syndrome

The Prisoner's Cinema: Sensory Deprivation

A Few Nanograms of Wine: Hallucinatory Smells

Hearing Things

The Illusions of Parkinsonism

Altered States

Patterns: Visual Migraines

The "Sacred" Disease

Bisected: Hallucinations in the Half-Field

Delirious

On the Threshold of Sleep

Narcolepsy and Night Hags

The Haunted Mind

Doppelgangers: Hallucinating Oneself

Phantoms, Shadows, and Sensory Ghosts

An interview with Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks, M.D. is a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine.
He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind’s Eye (2010). Awakenings (1973),
his book about a group of patients who had survived the great
encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century,
inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert
De Niro and Robin Williams. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine.”
Dr. Sacks is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Read Oliver Sacks’s full biography here. - from OliverSacks.com